Bhaskar Chakravorti in Forbes – “Can Democracy Be Saved From Datacracy?”
The Big Question For 2019: Can Democracy Be Saved From Datacracy?
While democracy has taken some body blows of late, it is clear that an invisible alternative regime has been on the rise. Welcome to datacracy: you are a participating citizen without even knowing it and you didn’t have to join a caravan or scale a border wall to get here – all you needed to do was join half the world’s inhabitants by going on the Internet and leaving a digital trace. In a datacracy, you are part of a societal organization ruled by the analysis of your and every other citizens’ digital traces. In fact, over the course of 2018, we got to know just how wide, deep and inter-woven the “data state” is – and how much more we have yet to learn.